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Lee Jones's BlogSat, 24 Mar 2018 17:43:22 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3J. G. Ballardhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=575
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=575#respondSat, 04 Aug 2007 14:17:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=223Like many students, I have very little time or energy for recreational reading. After a 10-hour day spent reading books or staring at a computer screen, my eyes tire quickly of an evening and reading more books is often just exhausting. This is of constant regret. At school, I read voraciously; as soon as I got to university I was just too busy, except during vacations; and now as a grad student I don’t even have vacations. Recently I’ve been trying to dedicate some time each day to recreational reading, which I love.

This week I read J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984), his autobiographical novel about his experiences as a child in Shanghai and Lunghua detention camp during WWII. It is a gripping and compelling book that I’d recommend to anyone – and it’s helped me understand a lot of Ballard’s later work. I’ve been a fan of Ballard since a friend of mine, Russ, introduced me to him about 3 years ago, in the summer before I came to Oxford. I read his Super-Cannes (2000) and High-Rise (1975) on a trip to Eastern Europe in September 2004.

These novels are very typical of his work: dystopian, nightmarish visions of modernity in which the respectable middle classes descend into brutal savagery at the drop of a hat. High Rise is the tale of a self-contained, high-rise community created specifically for the middle classes; with its own swimming pools, supermarkets, cinemas, and so on, the building can be completely shut off from the outside world. Shortly after everyone moves in, things start to go wrong and, deprived of basic comforts like dependable electricity supplies and air conditioning, civilization rapidly falls apart. The denizens form savage tribes, raiding other parts of the building for supplies and slaves in an orgy of lust, greed and violence. It is a profoundly disturbing book, but what strikes you is the sheer ordinariness of it all, the speed of the descent, and its failure to shock anyone.

Super-Cannes is about another self-contained community located outside of Cannes in France, written at the end of the dot-com boom. Super-Cannes is a middle-class utopia, trimmed, preened and attended by the silent poor, full of business executives and sleek technicians who, by night, engage in acts of barbarism. Noting that the incidence of mental illnesses in Super-Cannes is alarmingly high, the community’s chief psychiatrist prescribes a course of violence: the denizens embark on nightly ratissages into Cannes where they beat up and rape the local Algerian population. Reading Ballard’s novels always reminds me of the Nietzsche quotation about staring into the abyss and the abyss looking back at you: here is the dark heart of the abyss, lurking just beneath the vulnerable skein of the fragile, superficial ‘civilization’ we all take for granted, every day.Reading Empire of the Sun makes it clear where a lot of these themes come from. I don’t know enough about Ballard’s life to tell how true the events of the novel are, how closely they approximate Ballard’s experiences; but this is the way he wants to remember his childhood. Shanghai on the brink of the Japanese invasion is like Berlin in the 1920s, or America before the Great Depression: even as Japanese troops surround the city, even as Chinese refugees stream in to avoid the war raging in the countryside between Nationalists, Communists and the Japanese, the rich expatriate community continue a life of gaiety, swanning off in their limousines that crush the feet of Chinese beggars on their way to fancy-dress parties. Within moments, the lurking dread is made real as a Japanese frigate fires on the American and British naval vessels in the harbour, and the city falls like a house of cards. The Europeans and Americans are interned in concentration camps; Jim Ballard, separated from his parents, ends up at Lunghua camp.

The war, seen through Jim’s eyes, is frighteningly clear. There is none of the childish fantasy conjured up to mask the horrors of war (unlike in, say, the brilliant Spanish film, Pan’s Labyrinth). There is just the imperative of survival – and, most importantly and as a pre-requisite of survival, adaptation. Jim is rejected by virtually every adult he encounters; he is rarely if ever embraced or comforted. At first we think it might be due to his emaciated, diseased state, but the truth is made plain later. European adults recoil from him for two reasons. First, he shares few of their sympathies. Surrounded by the decadent, decaying remains of Western empires, and their feeble, wailing, subjected Chinese victims, he has far more respect for the disciplined, hard Japanese, and the robust, daring Americans. He is entranced by flight, dreaming of piloting a bomber, and his loyalties are torn apart as the war staggers to a close.

Second, he devotes his frenetic energy to keeping on going on: without the slightest hint of cynicism, without even losing a sense of basic decency (wanting to help people, wanting to repay rare acts of kindness), his life is kept going by a constantly shifting pattern of alliances as he attaches himself first to one figure or group, then another, intuitively knowing that this is not merely what the situation demands, but the very nature of human life. His energy in the camp is devoted not to wasting away longing for his parents (who he misses, but whose faces he soon forgets), nor to formulating plans for escape, but to keeping the camp running. He makes himself useful, running errands for Basie, a scheming American cabin steward whose short-term calculations make him a classic war profiteer, collecting rations in a card with a former Shanghai neighbour, digging graves for the missionary widows, collecting sewage to fertilise the camp’s meagre allotment. As Ballard puts it:

He had formed his only close bond in Lunghua with Dr Ransome, though he knew that in many ways the physician disapproved of him. He resented Jim for revealing an obvious truth about the war, that people were only too able to adapt to it.

The camp swiftly divides in the manipulators – like Basie – and the manipulated – like the genteel Europeans who pass the time bizarrely staging musicals and giving lectures on their pet topics. All adapt. What they fear is, ultimately, the end of the war. As long as the Japanese remain in the war, the rations, however inadequate, will continue to flow, and the camp will be guarded; food and security disappear with Japan’s fortunes. Everyone knows this – some even cheer when American B-59s are shot down – but it’s Jim’s obvious expression of this that unsettles them all. Not only are the prisoners only free in the camp, though; there is a grimmer truth.

Jim’s soul had already left his body and no longer needed his thin bones and open sores in order to endure. He was dead, as was Mr Maxted and Dr Ransome. Everyone in Lunghua was dead. It was absurd that they had failed to grasp this… Jim began to titter, relieved that he understood the real meaning of the war.

Despite its almost incomprehensible inhuman
ity – prisoners standing idly by as a Chinese coolie is clubbed to death by the Japanese – the camp offers security. Jim speculates the prisoners will miss Lunghua, that maybe they will all return to live there after the war. It seems an obscene suggestion; but after making his escape Jim does retreat to Lunghua, as do many other prisoners, clinging to the one site in the devastated surroundings where there are food drops and a semblance of civilization.

The themes of Empire of the Sun recur through Ballard’s fiction. Super-Cannes and High Rise for instance are full of shifting alliances, unthinking betrayals and descents to savagery. They are, I suppose, about the banality of evil, the ease with which humanity can slip into barbarism, the way human beings adapt to new circumstances, however beastly. There are always characters like Basie, who seem made for such situations, their narrow short-termism expanding their repertoire of skills just enough to fill the spaces opened up by the breakdown of society, floating like scum to the top as if trained for just such an eventuality. The figures who descend into savagery are invariably middle class, well-to-do professionals – like the expatriates whose decadence was swept away so quickly in Shanghai, only to be replaced in all-too-fragile and superficial a renaissance at the end of the book, as the Chinese civil war begins to rage, already presaging the final collapse.

But in addition to the Basies and the decadent savages, there are also figures like Dr Ransome, the one person Jim thinks would have felt compelled to intervene to save the coolie (and thus ensured his own absence from the scene). Ransome educates Jim in Latin, Biology, English, Geometry, heals him, worries about him, and cares for the camp without gratitude – he is an island of decency in an ocean of horrors. But, like everything else in the book, he just is, he is never sentamentalised, just human and imperfect. This might explain why doctors play a significant role in Ballard’s work. In Super-Cannes, the ‘hero’ is a young doctor attached to the community, sent there to replace the previous medic who went on a killing spree before being shot dead; the new doctor becomes obsessed with his predecessor and slowly uncovers the reason behind the murderous rampage – a desire for vengeance against the savage cruelty of Super-Cannes. The hero isn’t perfect – he falls prey to bribery, lust and drug dependency just to dull the senses enough to continue living among those people (his own form of adaptation, like Ransome’s hiding away in the camp infirmary) – but he does represent a faint glimmer of decency.

All in all, Ballard’s vision is a grim one, misanthropic even. It’s an inversion of many of the things I believe: it is about the worst aspects of modernity, the terrible truth that lies beneath the gossamer-thin facade of civilisation, the capacity for mankind to create technologies that brutalise and dehumanise us, to create living surroundings that strip away our sanities and our basic decency, to treat and use each other as objects. These dystopian readings of modernity belong to that generation of authors, philosophers, social theorists, and artists who saw in fascism (and perhaps earlier in the senseless destruction of the killing fields of WWI) the involution of modernity and progress: technology harnessed to maim and kill and destroy, to oppress and brutalise and dehumanise. It is unsurprising that a child, orphaned to all intents and purposes, who lived from the age of 10 to 14 in a Japanese concentration camp, would share in this terrible vision of modernity. It’s a vision that has been profoundly powerful and still affects us today. WWII dealt a mortal blow to the easy narratives of material and ideational progress that had sustained the West through the 19th century. The Cold War helped revive these narratives as what Odd Arne Westad in his brilliant book, The Global Cold War, calls the ’empire of liberty’ and the ’empire of justice’ faced each other across a new, nuclear abyss. The end of that conflict put progress back on its death bed, perhaps even into its coffin. Today, despite great strides in material and scientific progress, people are sceptical of science, distrustful of scientists’ attempts to meddle with ‘nature’ and ‘play God’; the environmentalist movement views our material progress as a burden, our rising expectations to be muted, third-world development as unacceptable; at its most extreme, human beings are seen as a virus plaguing the earth.

So why am I a fan of Ballard? I don’t share this miserabilist view of mankind, progress, or modernity; I believe progress has been made and remains possible. For me, Ballard stands at one end of a spectrum. His novels do document a basic fact, albeit sometimes in fantastical ways: human beings are indeed infinitely adaptable, even to the most horrific of circumstances, and the things we rely on to survive may include lies and cruelty and oppression – may indeed be pathological. A dispassionate observation of the present shows a world based on unjust power relations, a few rich on the basis of many more poor, cruelty in structures and not merely in personal relations, in which we are all, in one way or another, directly or indirectly implicated. I’d prefer to stand at the other end of the spectrum: while recognising the capacity of human beings for cruelty, also recognising their capacity for compassion and creativity; while recognising abuses of power and violence, recognising also a desire for peace, basic equality and social progress. Ballard’s vision is a pervasive one, and it produces tremendous, powerful, moving works of fiction that can be enjoyed regardless of your philosophical persuasion. The point is that it’s just one vision among many: he exposes a truth, a possible outcome, not the truth, the outcome. If human beings are infinitely adaptable, just think of what we could achieve, not while plumbing the depths of humanity, but in scaling its heights.